“Then why come to me?” I glanced at the speedometer and eased back on the gas. Stress always seemed to weigh down my foot. “Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the rescue at the library. But I’m a cataloger, two years out of the field.”

“You were the closest Porter I could trust to—”

“Nope,” I said. “I know what you told Deb, but the closest Porter to Dearborn, not counting Ray, would have been Nicola Pallas. Instead of a five-hour trip, you drove eight in order to—”

“Six.”

I ran the numbers in my head and winced to realize how fast she must have been going. “Six hours away from the vampires who had taken Shah, to find me. So either you knew the vampires were coming after me next—”

“I didn’t,” she said. “It’s possible they followed me. I didn’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean much.”

Sparklers could have run alongside the highway, keeping pace until they figured out where she was going, then running ahead to Copper River to track me down. I didn’t know what kind of records the vampires kept, but it wouldn’t be too hard to find the lone libriomancer working in the U. P.

Lena had saved my life, and Smudge trusted her, but something still wasn’t adding up. “You said you could trust me. Why? We barely know each other.”

“I . . . read your file.”

“I see.” I stared at the road. “So you already knew about Mackinac Island.” About everything I had told Doctor Shah. The nightmares, the grief, the breakdown when they reassigned me.

“Not everything.”

“Does Shah know you had access to her files?”

Lena shook her head. “If she knew, she’d be even angrier than you are.”

“I doubt that.” We were doing ninety by the time we hit Highway 2. I forced myself to relax. “Did it occur to you that breaking into someone’s psych records wasn’t the best way to build trust?”

“I’m sorry, Isaac. I didn’t have a choice.”

“Bullshit.”

“That’s easy for a human to say,” she shot back. “I couldn’t go after Nidhi. I wanted to. More than you’ll ever understand. But I couldn’t. Not alone. I needed you.”

“Why?”

“To protect me.”

“Me?” I choked back a laugh. “From what?”

“From what I am. What I could become.” She looked away. “There are two kinds of magical creatures in this world. Those that arose ‘naturally,’ and those that were created. I’m one of the latter. I was born fifty years ago in the pages of a cheap paperback.”

The stiffness in her body and the numbness in her voice reminded me of myself, sitting in Doctor Shah’s office after Mackinac Island. “You can’t bring intelligent beings into our world from books.”